NEW DELHI | BENGALURU: If you are a small merchant selling myriad stuff from a tiny store, chances are India’s largest e-commerce companies are looking for you.

Online marketplaces like Snapdeal, Paytm, Amazon and Flipkart are pulling out all stops to get more merchants to sell on their platforms, figuring the more vendors they have hawking an assortment of products the more buyers they can attract.

These companies are not only helping sellers list their products online and develop pricing strategies, they are also ramping up financial services for merchants, increasing warehousing capacity, and unveiling technology platforms that serve as one-stop shops for all merchant requirements.

“2016 will be the year that merchants start seeing the benefits of selling online,” said Sandeep Komaravelly, senior vice-president at Snapdeal and the head of its mobile marketplace Shopo. “But a lot more needs to be done by us. Last year was the year of oiling the machinery.” Last month, the New Delhi-headquartered Snapdeal launched Sherpalo, a platform that provides single-window access to all seller services, including onboarding, training, advertising and order and returns management.

It aims to have 10 lakh small and medium businesses transacting on its platform in 2-3 years, from about 2.5 lakh sellers now. For its mobile marketplace Shopo that it launched in July, Snapdeal is targeting 1 million sellers in 24-36 months. Presently, it has about 50,000 sellers on this platform.

Such lofty ambitions are driven by the prospect that India’s ecommerce market, including travel and payments, will likely breach $100 billion (about Rs 6.5 lakh crore) by fiscal 2020, according to a Goldman Sachs report, driven by increased internet and smartphone penetration, digital wallet adoption, and investments in last-mile logistics. But gross merchandise sales, the crucial metric that online retailers use to detail the total value of transactions on their platforms, will be driven by the e-commerce giants onboarding as many sellers as possible, say experts.

PayTM among most aggressivePaytm, the youngest of India’s ecommerce majors, is among the most aggressive in signing up sellers, much like China’s Alibaba Group, its biggest investor. “By the end of 2015, we had 1.7 lakh sellers, of whom about 1 lakh were verified with catalogues,” said Sudhanshu Gupta, assistant vice-president (business) at Paytm. “Over the next 12 months, we are looking to have 5 lakh verified sellers on board.”

The company has rolled out a platform called Paytm Go Big for anybody who wants to sell online or already is. It has also launched Paytm Force, which will have about 3,000 ecommerce specialists providing end-to-end services for sellers, including catalogue creation, order fulfillment and account management.

These initiatives are important not only to build large seller networks but also to ensure the sellers are active, said an investor in one of the online marketplaces. “It becomes equally if not more important to make them transact on the platform, and that’s the pain point everyone is trying to address,” this person said.

Amazon India, the domestic unit of the world’s largest online retailer, has launched a slew of services aimed at India’s 48-million strong small and medium enterprises (SME) sector, which, according to industry reports, accounted for more than 17% of India’s GDP in 2014. “We have seen significant traction from small and medium enterprises across the country and are witnessing over 250% growth in sellers year-over-year. Currently, over 55,000 Indian sellers sell on our platform,” said Gopal Pillai, director (seller services), Amazon India. Flipkart’s strategy is to focus on building up the small brands, in addition to its seller initiatives.

“Over the past one year we have seen that domestic brands in the accessories and home and kitchen appliances categories — including Maharaja Whiteline, Bajaj, Nova, Ambrane and Maxx — have grown at an aggressive 150% and contribute about 70% of (gross merchandise value) for the category itself,” said Adarsh Menon, vice-president of Flipkart’s electronics category. “Our focus is to nurture small brands into big brands.”

Hard on the heels of the giants is ShopClues, which wants to more than double its seller network to 7.5 lakh merchants by December. It recently launched a mobile app for merchants in small cities and towns and, according to Arun Goel, vice-president of products, is building a point-of-sale system so its merchants can “drive offline shoppers to the online platform”.